On the couch

Concern rippled through the movie world the day Guy Ritchie announced he was doing a Sherlock Holmes film.
Was one of the greatest crime characters going to get the “apples and pears” mockney London treatment that had earned the former Mr Madonna both a lucrative career and, following the massive failure of Revolver, his follow-up to Lock Stock… and Snatch, a tarnished reputation as a filmmaker?
As it turns out, no. The result of Ritchie’s Holmes reboot was a sort of Victorian buddy cop movie that showed all of the director’s best capabilities – snappy dialogue, good action scenes and keeping large, starry casts in line- without a hint of the self-indulgence that could’ve made the flick a whodunnit version of Eastenders.
The film takes from aspects of different Homes stories, as Baker Street’s most famous son takes on the case of death, misdirection and treason in pursuit of the evil Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), a man who may or may not be a master of demonic powers.
Slipping into the deerstalker, pipe and cocaine habit (none of which appear in the flick) of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous sleuth is Hollywood’s current hardest working man, Robert Downey Jnr.
The star of Iron Man 2 is perfectly cast as he is one of the few mega-stars working today that can carry a movie like this and be believably intelligent on-screen.
The new Holmes is far more of an action man than previous versions – less the shrewd Basil Rathbone-type and more a kung fu fighting House MD. Without the limp. This is where Downey shines, his smarts making what could have been a horrible character choice a believable evolution of Holmes.
Dr Watson gets a similar spruce-up style wise, shedding the bumbling dumbass image for something more Jude Law-shaped. The good doctor is now more than a match for Holmes both in crossing wits and fists and the banter between the two makes up much of what is to be enjoyed about the film.
In Ritchie’s hands, Sherlock Holmes barrels along at a fantastic pace never really stopping long enough for you to notice too much that the story is a bit more complicated and manic than maybe you’d expect for Conan Doyle’s creation.
While the manner in which Holmes’ deductive powers are portrayed is cool, there isn’t quite enough of it and the idea seems to be forgotten by the second half of the film when things become a straight-up action romp with some witty leads and a crisis you don’t really care about.
Rachel McAdam’s introduction as Irene Adler seems a little unnecessary but gets a good payoff at the very end and Mark Strong is, as always, a fantastic bad guy.
Overall though, Sherlock Holmes is fantastic craic. Funny, exciting, inventive. If only there could just be more of the good stuff the next time…
While Sherlock Holmes didn’t have quite enough of the things that made it good, Michael and Peter Spierig’s Daybreakers suffers perhaps from too much of too many good things.
It is set in a future when vampirism has overwhelmed society. Instead of an I Am Legend-style apocalypse, however, life has continued much as it was before – albeit with thicker curtains and a now streamlined red wine list – with the greatest crisis facing the population being the dwindling supply of humans and lack of a suitable blood substitute to nourish the population when the last one dies.
Ethan Hawke is a senior scientist with the largest blood suppliers in the US who falls in with an underground movement of both humans and vampires trying to end the farming and harvesting of people for their blood.
What begins as a very interesting idea – what if there was no Earth to save? – becomes increasingly more formulaic as the film goes on. A variety of film styles and clichés are also employed and any sort of film fan will get good sport out of playing the “that’s that bit from [insert film name here]”.
After bouncing from Equilibrium to The Matrix to Daybreakers finally comes to rest as a poor Evil Dead rip off with none of that film’s sense of humour.
Which is a shame because Daybreakers, with it’s solid cast and sound premise, could have been so much more than it ended up being.